Sympathy for Castle

[BrianG]

I can imagine! Some people have the policy where any solder job is good enough as long as it works. I've seen several solder jobs where it was apparent the user thought that simply dropping molten solder on a joint was the right way. They never heard of tinning, flux, heating the materials and letting the solder flow into the joint, or cleaning their blackened/oxidized iron.

I have seen a few come through our shop. I seen one lipo that had the wires extended. First the guy twisted some wire on to the ends and then put what could be best described as a drop of solder on there. When I questioned him about it he told me the solder is only there to make sure the wires don't separate and just the wires touching is enough to make a good contact.

Also seen a guy come back with a receiver that looked like it was attacked by a butane torch. What this poor fool did was he needed to extend his aileron servo wires which he did but in the process he didn't protect the three wires from each other properly. He used very thin wall shrink wrap on each wire and then heat shrunk the another bigger piece of shrink tubing over the top of them. So all three solder joints were pushing hard against each other and eventually it caused a short. It was obvious to see where th short occurred as the wire going to the servo was fine and the rest of it after the join that was going to the receiver was nicely toasted. All this happened in a 1/4 scale plane during mid flight. Don't have to tell you what happened to the plane. Anyway this fool tried to have a go at my boss and demanded that he pay for the repairs to the plane and new receiver. Laughter was the only response he got. One would think that guys who spend so much money on a RC plane would have a better idea what they are doing.